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A poem a day.

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Today the Masons are auctioningtheir discarded pom: a trunk of turbans,gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumeslabeled inside the collar “Potente”and “Vizier.” Here’s the chairs, blazonedwith the Mason’s sign, huddledlike convalescents, lean against one another

on the grass. In a casket are rhinestoned polesthe hierophants carried in parades;here’s a splendid golden staff some ranking officer waved,topped with a golden pyramid and a tiny,inquisitive sphinx. No one’s worn this stuff for years, and it doesn’t seem worth buying;where would we put it? Still,

I want that staff. I used to loveto go to the library- the smalltown brick refugeto those with nothing to do, really,‘Carnegie’ chiseled on the pedimentabove columns that dwarfed an inconsequential street.Embarrassed to carry the same book pastthe water fountain’s plastic centaurs

up to the desk again, I’d take The Wonders of the World to the Reading Roomwhere Art and Industry met in the muralon the dome. The room smelled like two decadesbefore I was born, when the namecarved over the door meant something.I never read the second section,

“Wonders of the Modern World”;I loved the promise of my father’s blueprints,the unfilled turquoise schemes,but in the real structuresyou could hardly imagine a future.I wanted the density of history,which I confused with the smell of the book:

Babylon’s ziggurat tropical with ferns,engraved water courses rippling;the Colossus of Rhodes balancedover the harbormouth on his immense ankles.Athena filled one end of the Parthenon,in an “artist’s reconstruction”,like an adult in a dollhouse.

At Halicarnassus, Mausolus remembered himselfimmensely, though in the bookthere wasn’t even a sketch,only a picture of huge fragments.In the pyramid’s deep clockworks,did the narrow tunnels mount towardthe eye of God? THat was the year

photos were beamed back from space;falling asleep I used to repeat a new wordto myself, telemetry, liking the wayit seemed to allude to something storied.The earth was whorled marble,at that distance. Even the stuck-on porticoesand collonades downtown were narrative,

somehow, but the buildings my father engineeredwere without stories. All I wantedwas something larger than our ordinary sadness-greater not in scale but in context,memorable, true to a proportioned,subtle form. Last year I knew a student,a half mad boy who finally opened his arms

with a razor, not because he wanted to diebut because he wanted to design something grandon his own body. Once he said, When a childrealizes his parents aren’t enough,he turns to architecture.I think I know what he meant.Imagine the Mason’s parading,

one of them, in his splendid get-up,striding forward with the golden staff,above his head Cheops’ beautiful shape-a form we cannot separate from the stories about the form,even if we hardly know them,even if it only signifies, it only shines.

Now I lay me down to study,I pray the Lord I don’t go nutty,And if I fail to learn this junk,I pray the Lord I do not flunk,And if I die, don’t bury me at all,Just lay my bones in the study hall,And pile my books upon my chest,And tell my proffs I did my best,So now I lay me down to rest,And pray I pass tomorrow’s test,And if I die before I wake,That’s one less test I’ll have to take.